


Edge of Forever

by PuffytheVampireSlayer



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Ending, Castiel/Dean Winchester One Shot, Destiel - Freeform, Fluff, Heaven, Love Confessions, M/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:20:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28196805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PuffytheVampireSlayer/pseuds/PuffytheVampireSlayer
Summary: “A boy is a gun.”Dean is dead and he has something he needs to address.An alternate finale ending.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Kudos: 16





	Edge of Forever

A boy is a gun.

Not the shining gleam of his baby brother or the dulled steel of his father, before that steel was dead and buried. Dean Winchester is cocked and tense and fury and soulless and everything that a gun can be. Primed and ready to fulfil its only function; injure, kill, and be reloaded. Go again and again and again, never tiring,never stopping, always a hair trigger away from lashing out,  _ click click bang _ the next thing is dead or rock-salted away. Dean is a weapon.

A boy is raised by burnished steel next to a shining collector’s item until he becomes a man and this man is also a gun. A gun that follows every impulse it has, biting, burning holes in the pockets of anyone who dared to carry him around for a few moments leaving a singed impression upon every soul he’s ever gotten too close to. This man is machine gun, firecracker pops and power and he crawls back from the dead over and over. 

Tooth claw nail beak barrel bullet  _ bang._

You’d expect that this man, this vessel of taut anger and unforgiveness,  could not go to heaven. From the outside, that’s what you’d assume of him.

You’d expect he couldn’t die.

In a way, it is a relief. Not killed by a monster. Not killed by a god or a demon or a creature at all. Felled by hubris. Felled by his own humanity. 

In another way, it is an insult. 

Dean had died so many times and in so many ways, his heart ripped open time after time after time. Losing his family, losing Sam, losing himself, losing — no. Not that name.

But he had lost it all. 

Battles. 

Resolve. 

Heart. 

Mind. 

Spirit. 

And got it all back, one way or another. He has beenmore battered and busted than John’s journal he is pleased to find in his jacket pocket when he wakes up. He’d forgotten what the comforting weight of it could feel like until now, but it seemed enhanced here in the warm, gasoline-and-leather scented interior of the Impala. He’d forgotten how good that felt to him too.

It was here that the gun realised he had died. 

Dean Winchester had lost a lot of things, a sense of his miniature luxuries among them. There is no way he felt the worn softness of his jacket or the weight of the journal or the comfort of the car and could still be alive and it hit him in a flash of memory, the hook and Sammy telling him to let go and god dammit, Sam.

If Dean is steel, Sam is made of gold. Soft and pliable. Strong, but destructible. He’d left him. 

Almost as soon as he thought it, the worry floated away from him. He can see the thought, think it with further intensity, but it won’t come back no matter what he tries. His heart beats steadily in his chest, a serenity of inaction he hasn’t felt in a long time.

He is hungry.

A store appears, full of his favourite food. There’s a diner at the back of it and his meal appears before he even orders it. A triple stacked burger from a rest stop he’d been at years and years ago. A milkshake he hasn’t tasted in over a decade. Pieces of heaven.

He smiles to himself as he chews. The burger is perfect. The milkshake is perfect. If this is heaven, he could handle it for a while. Until he had to go back. There would always be a way back. It doesn’t worry him because it isn’t a worry; it is a fact. He would return to Sam and he would carry on. Business as usual.

But there is something to be done first.

He sifts through names in his head carefully. People he misses. People who’d died. People he so carefully hadn’t thought about while he was busy being cold and angry, and people he has never forgotten. Bobby. His parents. Charlie. Jo. Ellen. More hunters. More friends. More loss than he could possibly contemplate filling the diner until Dean is soon in a room filled with living versions of every person he’d ever cared for, walking among them as they reach out and touch his face, hold his hand, force a hug on him. Here, he doesn’t mind it.

He talks and talks to all of them, saving one name in his head. Saving it till the end. He has to do something he’s been thinking about. Even if it didn’t count when he got back. Even if he had to do it again. It would count here, in his heaven. And it would be alright.

He thinks the final name and closes his eyes, turning as familiar faces move back, a strange beating sound echoing in the room that is suddenly bigger, brighter, louder as he turns towards it, opening his eyes and seeing wings first, Cas second. Of course this is how he’d appear. Full angel.

Cas does not look away from him.

Dean crosses the room slowly.

Cas had said something Dean hadn’t stopped thinking about right up until he died.

Dean needs to address it, now. Here in this room full of people. Alone in a room somewhere. Anywhere, without the threat of a monster or another hell bearing down upon them both, eating into the precious seconds they had together.

That didn’t matter now. Dean would go back to being a gun someday. But not today.

He reaches Cas and with shaking fingers, holds his hand out to him. Cas takes it after a moment. He doesn’t speak.

Dean closes his eyes one more time. They’ve brushed hands before, touched shoulders, enjoyed intimacy that was so slight, so subtle, he’s not even sure either of them registered it. He had spent so long forcing his mind to empty before he slept, afraid to dream of what those gentle touches meant. 

He opens them and Cas has drifted closer. They are inches apart, Cas’s fingers wound around his own and it feels terrifying and exhilarating and exactly right all at once. They are alone together in a crowded room and it feels right. Dean felt right. Whole.

‘Cas...’ he licks his lips, staring at Cas’s, wanting.

Cas squeezes his hand tighter and lifts his own hand, his fingertips setting the side of Dean’s face alight even with the slight pressure of them. He still does not speak. He has said his piece, before. Dean will kiss him when he says the three little words he’s wanted to say for weeks. Months. Years. An eternity. It seems bizarre that they had never been spoken aloud before, never existed. A gun and an angel, standing not at the mouth of a hell or on the precipice of death, but on the edge of a forever Dean never thought he’d get.

He takes a deep breath. Slow. Steady. The words prepare themselves to be said and then they’re out there, forever arriving without much fanfare – bar a decade of waiting.

‘I do too.’


End file.
